Five Features Of Google Webmaster Tools You Should Be Using

After creating a website, it may be hard to tell how well your site is actually doing without a way to mea. This is where Google Webmaster Tools come into play giving you metrics to things such as the number of clicks or details on what keywords are ranked higher in a search query. There are many features in the Google Webmaster Tools to help create a healthy Google-friendly website, here a five features you should be using:

1.Search Queries

This feature provides data that looks at the Google Web Search queries that returned pages to your site. The Search Queries feature also allows you to look at things such as Impressions (number of times pages from your site appears in search results), Clicks (number of times a user clicked on your link from a search query), CTRs (percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site), and Average Position (your average position on a search results page). In addition, you can look at data from the last 30 days and the change over a period of time with a simple calendar dropdown.

2. Index Status

This feature gives you stats on things such as Total Indexes, Ever Crawled, and Blocked By Robots. These stats lets you know if your site is being indexed and also lets you know if Google is having trouble accessing your content. It is important to see these metrics because they will let you know if your site needs configuration or has problems with redirects or security.

3. HTML Improvements

Tying in with Index Status, sometimes pages do not get crawled and indexed. The HTML Improvements page will show you potential issues that can improve drive traffic to your site and help your site not be overlooked. Potential issues could be problems with your title, meta description problems, and non-indexable content. HTML Improvements works to help you correct some of these issues.

4. Manual Webspam Actions

A recent feature added under the “Manual Actions” tab, this allows webmasters to look at webspam action and remove them to keep spam out of a users’ search results. It will show if the spam is in a particular section of your site or if it is site-wide and also if it is user-generated spam or if your site is victim to hacking. This is important because affects site ranking or individual page ranking.

5. Content Keywords

This page lists the most significant keywords and related keywords that Google finds when crawling your website. It can show you how the keywords rank in a search query result, and when looked with Search Queries, it will give you insight into how Google is interpreting your site. If there are unexpected keywords that are associated with your site on this page, this lets you know that your site may have been hacked.

There are many Google Webmaster Tool features that should you should check out as they are constantly being improved, but these five features are great if you don’t know where to start.

[author] Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin web design company. He finds Google Webmaster Tools to be extremely helpful.[/author]